I shot most of these pictures from the passenger seat of a moving car
in 1992-3. I let intuition guide me, reaching up to snap a picture when
something caught my attention—a sudden opening across the landscape,
light glancing off a barn roof, a moment when my field of vision seemed
to turn on its axis and stack itself in front of me. Lined by miles
of black rail fences bordering thoroughbred horse farms, the back roads
of the Bluegrass immerse you into color, form, and fragments of Kentucky’s
history. As the landscape rushed past the car window, responding to
this beauty with my camera felt natural and inevitable.
Though these pictures share a reliance on chance and intuition with
street photography in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson, they are
not “decisive moment” photographs in the sense Bresson describes.
In the decisive moment, you monitor promising events as they unfold,
snapping the shutter just as the elements cohere into the best possible
photograph. There is, in Bresson’s words, a “precise organization
of forms” that you target and try to capture on film. As Joel
Meyerowitz, a Bresson protégé in his early years, describes
it, you are a “visual athlete” making “sensational
catches.”

By contrast, I’m looking for insights that aren’t possible
when the camera simply materializes an ideal already pictured in the
mind. The motion of the car makes chance a collaborator in these photos,
a role I often underscored further by flicking my wrist or rotating
the camera when snapping the shutter. Instead of zeroing in on a subject
through the viewfinder, I used the camera as an extension of my body
in space, making it a part of events as much as a tool for observing
them. Sometimes I thought of it as a paint brush, marking on a canvas
I wouldn’t see until days later. My hope was to see my improvisational
encounters transformed on the photograph's two-dimensional picture plane
in richer ways than I could have predicted. The end result was a stack
of prints that functioned simultaneously as photographic records and
found objects, requiring yet another round of aesthetic decisions, one
echoing those I made in the passenger seat of a moving car.

These photographs also use time in a different way than ordinary street
photographs. In the decisive moment, you freeze time, which sets up
a troubling analogy between the eye and a camera with a very fast shutter
speed. By allowing time to function, I’m looking for a closer
model for how perception works and the role time can play in shaping
it. There are fleeting moments—just before the conscious mind
begins to sort things into familiar categories—when intuition
gives a defining stamp to the visual, when we see with the freshest
eyes. To me, these enlargements open windows onto such moments. To be
able to revisit them in such detail feels magical to me. I hope some
of that magic comes through for others.